Using mass text alerts to catch a killer

At eight o’clock on Monday morning last week, millions of mobile phones across New York City got a text alert. It read: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The message related to the man suspected of planting the previous weekend’s bombs in New York and New Jersey, who was duly picked up later that day. At a press conference after the arrest, NYPD commissioner James O’neill said the alert had given the police an edge, and hailed it as “the future”. Excuse me for not cheering, said Brian Feldman on Nymag.com. Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAS) are supposed to be used for warnings of imminent threats to the public, and alerts from the president, not for deputising citizens for a manhunt. “In a country where people are routinely harassed and assaulted for just appearing to be Muslim”, this was “remarkably ill-advised”.

Last week’s mass text was not entirely unprecedented, said Russell Brandom and Adi Robertson on The Verge. Since the WEA system was implemented in 2012, more than 21,000 alerts have been sent, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In most cases, these alerts have warned people in specific neighbourhoods about dangerous weather or missing children, or told them to “shelter-inplace” during active shooter situations. The closest thing we’ve seen to New York’s mass text was an alert sent last year about a fugitive in Wisconsin, but that was only broadcast over a two-mile radius, not over a dense city of eight million people. If the WEA becomes “a routine way to hunt down suspects of any crime”, there’s a danger that the public will stop paying attention to the texts, or choose to opt out of the alert system.

Worse still, these alerts could trigger mass panic, said Benjamin Wallace-wells in The New Yorker. The public is already on edge about terrorism: there have been several false scares in recent months. In August at JFK airport, for example, hundreds of people, convinced terrorists had launched an attack, caused a stampede. (As they ran, they sent metal poles crashing to the ground with a sound like gunfire, causing further panic.) In such a paranoid climate, mass alerts are the last thing we need. What was needed at JFK was the very opposite sort of message – one of reassurance: “WANTED: No one at all”.